Bad Bet on the Bayou: The Rise of Gambling in Louisiana and the Fall of Governor Edwin Edwards

Rating:
Summary: real life more outlandish than fiction
Review: "Vote for the crook. It's important." This was a bumper sticker seen around Louisiana at the time of the Edwards-Duke Election. It implores the electorate to vote for the three-time governor whose definition of an honest politician was one who stayed bought in order to beat the former Ku Klux Klan wizard.
Like this bumper sticker, the book is funny--the thievery was so inept and outrageous, yet sad because this stuff was really going on.
The author knows his stuff, and the subject area, Edwin Edwards and the rise of gambling in Louisiana is a great story. This book reads like a thriller.

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: "Vote for the crook. It's important." This was a bumper sticker seen around Louisiana at the time of the Edwards-Duke Election. It implores the electorate to vote for the three-time governor whose definition of an honest politician was one who stayed bought in order to beat the former Ku Klux Klan wizard.
Like this bumper sticker, the book is funny--the thievery was so inept and outrageous, yet sad because this stuff was really going on.
The author knows his stuff, and the subject area, Edwin Edwards and the rise of gambling in Louisiana is a great story. This book reads like a thriller.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Bet Big Winner
Review: A fascinating chronicle of Louisiana's former governor and the state's infamous wheeling and dealing. If Louisiana's politics are a contact sport then watching political high jinks is the state's favorite spectator sport. This is the hottest read to come off the press lately. Packed with blazing reality it was written by a reporter who obviously knows how to tell a story detailed with the people, places and greed that make gambling a chump's game. It's fast paced, accurate and a brutal picture of Louisiana's swampy back rooms. This book is a sure thing.

Rating:
Summary: Bad Bet on the Bayou
Review: As a writer of fiction, NOTHIN' LEFT TO LOSE, Summerhouse Press 1999, I am always pleasantly surprised when I find non-fiction books that carry me along with the interest and appreciation of good writing that I find in exceptional novels. Tyler Bridges has achieved this in BAD BET ON THE BAYOU. Having been involved in a professional situation with the gaming industry when the question came up in Louisiana, I was very familiar with some of the events that took place. Mr. Bridges covers these events accurately and his penchant for detail is exceptional. With the number of players involved in this story, the author faced the difficult task of keeping the lineup straight for the reader. He has done a masterful job of this. Beyond the journalistic aspects of the book, I was most impressed with Mr. Bridges style and the development of the characters that were involved. Edwin Edwards is obviously more than a money-hungry, political buffoon, and the author did a tremendous job of exposing the dichotomy that is the former governor's personality. Clear pictures of the many paradoxs within the man emerged through the author's writing. Even the lesser characters became more than just who's who of the underbelly of Louisiana politics. I congratulate the author on a difficult job well done.

Rating:
Summary: a cautionary tale
Review: Don't write anything you can phone. Don't phone anything you can talk. Don't talk anything you can whisper. Don't whisper anything you can smile. Don't smile anything you can nod. Don't nod anything you can wink. -Earl Long, brother of Huey Long and himself a Governor of Louisiana

From a distance, it has seemed like Edwin Edwards was either the Governor of Louisiana or on trial for corruption, or possibly both at the same time, for nearly all of the past twenty five years. Tyler Bridges, a former reporter for the Times-Picayune, who covered the successful efforts to legalize gambling there in the 1990s, has written a thorough account of that struggle and of the political career of the extraordinarily colorful and resilient Edwards. In particular, he focusses on the fault line where the two stories came together, and how the slippery and seemingly invincible Governor was finally brought down by his eager and quite lucrative involvement in the rampant corruption surrounding the gambling industry.

In so doing, Bridges handles a welter of really labyrinthine information quite adeptly, wringing out of it a narrative that is relatively easy to follow (though sometimes, quite annoyingly, repetitious). The tale is replete with shady Southern con men, mobsters, pols on the take, and features cameo appearances by well known scoundrels such as David Duke, Eddie DeBartolo, and Bill Clinton. In the final section, as the FBI and Federal prosecutors close in on Edwards and bring him to trial, there is genuine drama : will he slip off the hook yet again, or has the barb finally been set deep enough ? And as many states face the question of whether to rely increasingly on gambling revenues, instead of taxes, there's a real object lesson in the dangers they face.

For all of that, there's something strangely missing from the story : there's no tragic arc to it. In that greatest of all political novels, All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren used the story of Huey Long and the miasmic Louisiana setting to explore the tragedy of how essentially decent men could be corrupted by the exercise of political power, the allure of easy money, and, most importantly, the self-assurance that even while doing well themselves they were doing good for others. There is no moment, let alone a period, in the career of Edwin Edwards where he seems to have been genuinely concerned with trying to help the core of poor constituents, many of them black, who made up his base of power. Nor do his voters appear to have harbored any illusions that he was truly on their side. Bridges conveys a real sense that Edwards appeal lay almost entirely in his personal charm and the natural attraction folks feel toward a charming rogue. As a result, there are no intimations of tragedy here, neither that Edwards is a good man whose faults brought him down, nor that this was a case where deserving supporters had their justifiable hopes betrayed. Edwards was a crook. Everyone knew he was a crook. He did little or nothing to improve the lives of average Louisianans. They voted for him anyway. It's awfully hard to avoid the feeling that he and they got exactly what they deserved.

The journalism is, for the most part, excellent--clear, concise, and well paced--and the book is filled with amusing scenes. The portrait Bridges paints of the effects of gambling on at least this one state is truly devastating. On the other hand, one wishes that an editor had excised some of the needlessly repetitious material and it's too bad that Edwards was not as tragic a figure as he was comic. But these things do weaken what is otherwise quite a good book.

GRADE : B-

Rating:
Summary: This book is a great bet...
Review: Even for close followers of the Louisiana political landscape, things can get highly confusing with the favoritism, kick backs, back room deals, bribes, and bizzare family and professional political relationships. Throw in Edwin Edwards, David Duke, Edddie Debartalo and a rogues gallery of legislators, judges, the Mafia and some casino executives and we are left with a titantic mess in Louisiana. Happily this book sorts it all out, leaving us with the very unpretty picture of what happened in Louisiana over the last decade. It tells the story of the rise of legalizing gambling in Louisiana and the resultent social, economic and political disasters that followed. Bridges makes a powerful case for political reform and writes with a languid style reminisisent of a slow moving bayou. A bit too much repetitive text (I said "I read that already" a few two many times) but overall a masterful work.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting Read
Review: Huey Long, move over! This riveting tale of corruption reads like a nonfiction version of The Firm. With journalistic precision, Bridges details the patronage, extortion, payoffs, and other shady dealings that permeated four-term Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards' administration. While Edwards is the central focus of the book, the author introduces us to an array of fascinating characters. These range from mobsters intent on getting a cut of Louisiana's gambling revenues to ordinary people confronted with navigating an unthinkably dysfunctional state government. Bridges clearly knows his material and shows remarkable insight into the strange netherworld of Louisiana politics.

Rating:
Summary: Where was "60 Minutes"
Review: I got this book for my husband, as he's the non-fiction reader in our family. I was out of something to read, so I picked it up and could NOT put it down.

Bridges does a great job of putting a lot of convoluted information into readable form. Edwin Edwards and his Crazy Cajun Cronies didn't really do anything new...they just continued a long tradition of crooked Louisiana Politics!

I enjoyed almost all of this book...the only parts that made my eyes glaze over were the details regarding the financing. My mind just can't wrap around deals where the broker stands to make 27 MILLION dollars....and then one million a year after that!

If you ever wanted a peek into the world of slick politicians, oily gangsters and brash billionaires, this is your book. BAD BET ON THE BAYOU should be required reading for anyone who votes!

Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Whew! What a ride!
Review: I got this book for my husband, as he's the non-fiction reader in our family. I was out of something to read, so I picked it up and could NOT put it down.

Bridges does a great job of putting a lot of convoluted information into readable form. Edwin Edwards and his Crazy Cajun Cronies didn't really do anything new...they just continued a long tradition of crooked Louisiana Politics!

I enjoyed almost all of this book...the only parts that made my eyes glaze over were the details regarding the financing. My mind just can't wrap around deals where the broker stands to make 27 MILLION dollars....and then one million a year after that!

If you ever wanted a peek into the world of slick politicians, oily gangsters and brash billionaires, this is your book. BAD BET ON THE BAYOU should be required reading for anyone who votes!

Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Good recount
Review: I purchased this book with great hesitation -- with the 1983 campaign picture of Edwin Edwards on the cover, I was expecting a sensationalist bashing of Edwards and his clan. If this is what you are expecting, I suggest you read Clyde Vidrine. I am not yet finished with this book, however the recount of the Louisiana "gaming" process is a trip down memory lane for those who were there or followed the story closely. The author takes a very complex series of events and nicely lays things into place so that the reader neither becomes confused or bored. In places there is some redundancy and omissions - but on the whole this book seems to be an attempt to accurately recount Louisiana's faux pas in a unbiased manner.